Reading/Multimedia/Meetings/Next Cycle 3 Q4 2013-14

MULTIMEDIA NEXT CYCLE PLANNING: Q4 - Cycle 3'
Meeting Notes - June 5 and 16, 2014

The Wikimedia Foundation's multimedia team held planning meetings for our next development cycle on June 5 and 16, 2014 in San Francisco. Here are our notes, prepared collaboratively on this shared notepad.

Participants[edit]

Gilles Dubuc - engineering team lead
Fabrice Florin - product manager, host
Pau Giner - interaction designer
Mark Holmquist - frontend engineer
Rob Lanphier - engineering director
Keegan Peterzell - community liaison
Gergo Tisza - backend engineer

Agenda[edit]

Goals for Next 6-week Cycle
Current Cycle Performance Review
Capacity of the team in this Next Cycle
Estimate Stories for this Next Cycle
Estimate Backlog left for Current Cycle
Determine which Tasks to move into the Next Cycle

Discussion[edit]

Goals for Next Cycle[edit]

Review this Next Cycle's goals (10 mins).

Our next development cycle starts on June 11, and ends on July 22 (overlapping fiscal Q4 and Q1).

For this 6-week cycle, we plan to wrap up the Media Viewer project and start work on our next two big projects this year: Upload Wizard and Structured Data — while reserving about a third of our time to address critical bugs and technical debt for other multimedia tools.

For this next 6-week cycle, we propose to invest our time between these main projects:

Media Viewer - fix critical bugs, important feature tweaks (2-3 sprints, based on community feedback)
Upload Wizard - planning and first steps (bug fixes, metrics, feedback, discussions, designs, code review, unit tests)
Critical Bugs / Tech Debt - fix serious issues that need quick solutions (e.g. image scalers, GW toolset, timed media handler)
Structured Data - planning with Wikidata and first steps (mockups, specifications, discussions, code review)

See this updated Mingle wall for what is now our current cycle.

Current Cycle Results[edit]

Review Current Cycle achievements and overall performance (15 mins).

See Completed Tasks for last cycle.

Key accomplishments:
- released Media Viewer on most large wikis (25 million image views/day !)
- developed metrics system to track image views, key actions, image load and network performance
- collected 13k survey responses (60% approval) and talk page feedback, processed comments to identify key issues
- developed final features and bug fixes based on community feedback (e.g. view original file, prominent file page link, metadata visibility)
- solved critical bugs and technical debt for other multimedia tools (e.g. Image Scalers, GW Toolset, TimedMediaHandler)
- started Upload Wizard project: planning, bug fixes, code review, refactoring, metrics, user feedback, designs
- started Structured Data project: planning, discussions, research, code review
- defined annual plan for multimedia in 2014-15

We completed about 112 points in the last 6 weeks (vs. 128 points in previous 6-week cycle, with 4 engineers instead of 3)
Current Cycle Breakdown:
- Stories: 36 pts. (32%)
- Tasks: 26 pts. (23%)
- Bugs: 25 pts. (23%)
- Tech Debt: 3 pts. (3%)
- Scope Increase: 18 pts. (16%)
- Team Meetings: 3 pts. (3%)
Previous cycle breakdown: Stories 72 points, Bugs 30 pts, Tech debt 7 pts, Scope increase 15 pts, Meetings 3 pts).

This means about 91 pts. for planned development overall (excluding meetings and scope increases = ~19 points)
That's about 19 points per week, or 15 points of planned development per weekly sprint (vs. 18 points last cycle, with 4 engineers)

Team Capacity[edit]

Estimate Capacity of the team in this Next Cycle (5 mins).

Estimated capacity : ~10.5 points/ week = ~62 points for the Next Cycle (a bit less since Gilles and Mark will taking about 2 weeks off)

Next Cycle Estimates[edit]

Estimate Stories proposed for this Next Cycle and come up with the final list based on the estimations and capacity of the team (30min).

Estimate Backlog left for Current Cycle
Identify top candidates for Next Cycle
Estimate new tasks under consideration for Next Cycle

The Current Cycle wall now includes separate columns for Media Viewer (14-22 points), Structured Data (9 points), Tech Debt (18 points) and Upload Wizard (14-22 points). We don't expect to complete all these tasks in this cycle, as they exceed the anticipated team capacity for this period, but wanted to have the flexibility to choose between different options as circumstances dictate.

Next Cycle Tasks[edit]

Determine which Tasks to take on for the Next Cycle, and which to push back to Subsequent or other Cycles (15 mins).

Reach team consensus on top priorities
Move relevant tasks over to the Next Cycle for development
Push back other tasks over to Subsequent Cycle or later
Adjust above goals as needed
See updated Mingle wall

Media Viewer[edit]

For our first two weekly sprints, our focus will be on these Media Viewer improvements, to address community concerns on English and German Wikipedias:

View original file (#630)
View different image sizes (#664)
Scroll down to see more info (#697)
Show Commons link to logged out users (#429)
Instant Opt-out (#703)
Opt-out for anons (#704)
Add tooltips to Media Viewer (#546)
Disable MediaViewer for certain images (#511)

The features above are expected to deploy on all wikis tomorrow. Many of them are live already on Media Viewer sites, and we are starting to hear positive responses on our talk pages, with survey approvals trending up for English and German users.

Other tasks in development or analysis include:

Make it easier to find image information (#706)
Show attribution credits in download tool (#598)
Make 'Commons link' and 'Use this file' more discoverable (#732)
Improve Media Viewer UI on tablets (zoom/scroll) (#716)
Remember the last selection for ‘Use this file' (#660)
Track Media Viewer Opt-outs (/#558, #675)
Track 'View original file’ and ‘Commons link' clicks (#715, #726)

To learn more, click on the relevant cards in our current sprint wall.

Upload Wizard[edit]

We have started planning and development on Upload Wizard, which will be our main user-facing project in the coming year. For now, we are focusing on metrics, feedback, bug fixes, unit tests, code refactoring and a few small user interface improvements.

Here are some of the tasks we plan to take on this cycle:

Metrics & Funnel Analysis (#305, #541, #603, #587)
Analyze user feedback for Upload Wizard (#624)
Code Refactoring Plan (#344)
UI Improvement Plan (#342)
First Unit Tests (#70)
Show progress bar during upload (#651)
Upload Wizard FAQ links (#625)

To learn more, check out this updated project page.

Structured Data[edit]

We are starting to work with the Wikidata team to plan this project, which aims to provide machine-readable data for media files on Wikimedia Commons.

Our main activities this cycle include:

Planning meetings with Wikidata
Mockups and schemas for a new metadata structure
Community discussions to understand user needs and workflows
Definitions for a high-level class for image metadata

To learn more, check out this new project page.

Critical Bugs / Tech Debt[edit]

We will continue to allocate about a third of our time to address urgent bugs and technical debt to gradually improve our multimedia infrastructure.

Here are some tasks we are considering for this cycle:

Create poolcounter group for expensive thumbnails (#623)
Pre-render thumbnails in all sizes on the back-end (#301)
Fix TimedMediaHandler resource loading (#543)
Push messages to logstash from JS (#127)
Create vagrant role for Commons (#632)
TimedMediaHandler Improvements (e.g. #729)
GW Toolset Improvements

To learn more, click on the relevant cards in our Technical Debt wall.

For a roadmap of our goals for these projects in future cycles, visit this planning page for 2014-2015.